How the popular social media app affects our brain, our behavior, and our mental health.
There are more than a billion users on TikTok today, including nearly 25% of the United States. At the same time, TikTok’s demographic skews towards younger audiences, with 63% of the platform comprising users under age 30.
This isn’t an uncommon phenomenon — younger demographics tend to be the first to adopt a new platform, and are also first to move off platforms that are deemed “too old” or out of fashion. In 2020, 30% of teens named TikTok as their favorite social media app. (In comparison, just 2% of teens cited Facebook as their favorite.)
What was once an app for lip-syncing and 10-second dance routines has evolved into a global behemoth that won’t be going away any time soon. But what makes TikTok so addictive? Why do users return day after day? And how does TikTok affect our psychology, especially in users whose brains are still very much developing?
TikTok’s algorithm is designed to keep you coming back for more
With each video you watch, TikTok learns something about you. Within a few hours, it can detect your music tastes, sexual orientation, mental health, and sense of humor. So if you watch a video of a cute dog, TikTok will show you another pet video. Have you considered cats? Well, what about snakes? And unless you start skipping those dog videos in favor of the “What I Eat In a Day” trend, you’ll find yourself knee deep in #dogsoftiktok three hours later.
In December 2021, The New York Times reviewed one of TikTok’s leaked internal documents, which was developed to teach nontechnical employees about the platform’s algorithm. This document supports the idea that the platform wants you on the app every day, for as long as it can get you.
Interestingly, the document indicated that the platform purposefully shows users videos that are close to what they want to see, but not exactly on the nose. This way, users continue to watch and gain exposure to other videos that they may be interested in along the way.
According to Julian McAuley, a computer science professor at UC San Diego, the algorithm isn’t new — it’s just unique. TikTok not only has crazy amounts of data and highly engaged users, but it also has “a setting where users are pushed to consuming algorithmically recommended content (think how few other settings have all of these characteristics!).” So while Instagram feeds you mostly content from those you follow (until last year), your default on TikTok is a “For You” stream of recommended content.
How the algorithm hacks your brain
Forbes’ John Koetsier memorably deemed TikTok “digital crack cocaine for your brain.” He may not be wrong. According to a leaked data report in 2021, users spend an average of 89 minutes a day on TikTok. In his article, Koetsier interviewed Dr. Julie Albright and discussed how when we use TikTok, we are essentially drugging ourselves.
“When you’re scrolling… sometimes you see a photo or something that’s delightful and it catches your attention,” Albright says. “And you get that little dopamine hit in the brain… in the pleasure center of the brain. So you want to keep scrolling.” — Digital Crack Cocaine: The Science Behind TikTok’s Success
This psychology is similar to what we see in dating apps. We receive a nice hit of dopamine when we find a video we like on TikTok, but because the algorithm serves us different videos throughout the day, it’s an uncertain outcome. This works because unpredictable rewards cause more activity in reward regions of the brain than rewards we know are coming.
Essentially, when on social media apps like TikTok, dopamine hits your brain in one of two ways:
- You receive an unpredictable reward, and your brain rewards you with a healthy dose of dopamine.
- Your brain adapts to the unpredictable reward system and preemptively rewards your anticipated risk.
Through this system, TikTok users can develop a Pavlovian feedback loop. Once a brain gets used to the neurological release, it learns to anticipate and reward the body for even just exposure to the source of that release. Nathalie Nahai reports that this is known as a dopamine loop. “It’s a sense of reward and seeking out more of the same to get an arousal hit.”
Our brains grow and change based on our surroundings — we pride ourselves on being adaptable creatures.
According to Dr. Albright, “platforms like TikTok — including Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook — have adopted the same principles that have made gambling addictive.”
TikTok’s effect on attention span
Today, many media reports are circulating the idea that TikTok is causing negative long-term effects on the brain, especially in younger users, whose minds won’t reach full development until age 25.
Most articles, including John Koetsier’s Forbes piece, state that TikTok is lowering users’ attention spans. The Independent found that most users experienced shorter attention spans following extended use of the app, citing the ease, availability, and short time span of entertaining content.
However, many of the claims regarding shortened attention span come without the science to back it up — at least not when it comes to TikTok. Due to the newer state of the app, most evidence is circumstantial or anecdotal at this point.
But while TikTok may not be a truly substantiated culprit at the moment, we do know that social media use in general is lowering our collective attention span. A 2019 study found that news cycles are becoming shorter and shorter, with content turnover rates increasing year after year.
In general, any significant time on your phone is going to influence your brain function. After all, our brains grow and change based on our surroundings — we pride ourselves on being adaptable creatures. So whether it’s increased anxiety and depression, sleep disruption, gray matter atrophy, or the premature thinning of our brain’s exterior cortex, we know that too much screen time is bad for us, period.
But there are some effects that we’re already seeing
While much of the evidence of TikTok’s negative effects is anecdotal, or could be attributed to excess screen time in general, there are some interesting reports related to TikTok specifically.
The Wall Street Journal reported on a possible correlation between the rise of young girls presenting with symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome, and their exposure to popular Tourette’s videos on TikTok. This is notable because tics are often a symptom of mental distress, in addition to being a symptom of Tourette’s. So in this case, TikTok may not have caused a particular underlying illness, but instead changed the commonality and awareness of one of its symptoms.
Another aspect of TikTok is a product of its visual foundation. Plus-sized content creators are more likely to be flagged for inappropriate or sexual content over thinner counterparts with comparable posts, and the vast majority of TikTok’s top content creators are thin, young people. As with other visual apps like Instagram, this distorted lens of “normal” bodies can be problematic for users’ body image and self esteem, especially for teenagers.
TikTok can also lead to users misdiagnosing their mental health issues. Doctors have marked a distinct rise in young adults self-diagnosing with ADHD, OCD, and autism. And while raising awareness of these issues can be incredibly helpful, it holds the potential for harm when users self-diagnose with conditions such as Dissociative Identity Disorder. This can lead to misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment for the underlying cause of anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues.
Finally, TikTok’s algorithm can expose impressionable users to extremist content. In one study, researchers Abbi Richards and Olivia Little found that transphobia acted as a “gateway prejudice that leads to broader far-right radicalization” on the app. The researchers created an account and found that the more transphobic content they engaged with, the more racism, misogyny, and homophobia turned up on the test account’s For You Page. Richards and Little found a noticeable spike in far right content around video 400, including explicit calls to violence. While 400 videos sounds like a lot, it’s really not so much in TikTok’s world of 20-second videos. Richards commented, “A user could feasibly download the app at breakfast and be fed the overtly white supremacist neo-Nazi content before lunch.”
The upside of TikTok
“10 years of therapy, and what I needed to hear, I heard on TikTok.”
TikTok’s algorithm holds up a mirror, in that it creates content more personalised to our unique circumstances than ever before. While that can come with downsides, such as transphobia as a gateway prejudice, or body image dysmorphia, it can also provide users with heartwarming and important awareness surrounding the ideas of inclusivity and belonging. For example, users with niche interests are more likely to find others with similar interests, whether it’s cosplay, D&D, or archery.
Users who find themselves on #mentalhealthtiktok or #therapytiktok are exposed to new ideas and vocabulary for aspects of their lives that they may not have been previously able to articulate. Users have also reported feeling that by accessing these aspects of the app, there is a perceived lowering of the stigma surrounding mental health, and increased normalisation of therapy and medication. As one user stated, “10 years of therapy, and what I needed to hear, I heard on TikTok.”
Like most parts of life, there are both good and bad sides. The more we understand something and how it affects our life, the better we can interact with it.
Personally, I wish I could give any 16-year-old self the same exposure to these communities that I have now. I would have known that I wasn’t strange, and I wasn’t alone. And if other teens and young adults can grow up knowing that same, precious, incredible idea, then it can’t be all bad.
